Persons, Situations, and Person-Situation Interactions

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To appear in: John, O.P., & Robins, R.W. (in press). Handbook of personality: Theory and research (4th Edition). New York: Guilford.

Persons, Situations, and Person-Situation Interactions

R. Michael Furr, Wake Forest University David C. Funder, University of California, Riverside

Why do people do what they do? Can psychologists predict how a particular person will behave in a particular situation? Better yet, can psychologists explain why the person behaves that way in that situation? What people do depends both on who they are--their dispositions such as personality traits--and the situation they are in. The obviousness of this statement only highlights how odd it is that psychologists manage to find ways of disagreeing with each other over its implications. As the decades-long "person?situation debate" continues to prove (Donnellan, Lucas, & Fleeson, 2009; Fleeson & Furr, 2016; Funder, 2001; Kenrick & Funder, 1988), a surprising number of researchers appear to be personally as well as professionally invested in believing that either situations or persons have stronger effects on behavior. By focusing on person-situation interaction, rather than person-situation competition, personality psychology is moving beyond such disagreements and debate, toward a more complete understanding of why people do what they do. The purpose of this chapter is to present the idea of person-situation interaction, its conceptual roots, and the ways in which it shapes contemporary personality research and theory.

These issues are important because person-situation interaction should be a key

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foundation for any personality theory that attempts to explain why a given person behaves in a given way in a given situation. Not all theories in personality psychology (or social psychology) are intended to be comprehensive in this way, and such theories might reasonably focus on concepts, processes, or phenomena that might not reflect person-situation interaction. However, person-situation interaction is an essential part of a broader understanding of why people do what they do.

By distilling and integrating contemporary approaches to person-situation interaction, we hope to direct readers' attention to some of the most promising directions in personality psychology, and stimulate new ideas that advance understanding of personality and its effects on behavior CONCEPTUAL ROOTS OF PERSON-SITUATION INTERACTIONS

As a way of understanding "why do people do what they do?" and "how can we explain why a person behaves in a certain way in a certain situation?," the idea of person-situation interaction grows from two conceptual roots ? one focusing on peoples' dispositions, and one focusing on situational factors.

The Dispositional Roots The dispositional root is the understanding that a person's behavior is affected by stable

qualities of that person. For example, whether a person is generally talkative or quiet is determined, in part, by some quality of that person. There is a psychological disposition that affects the person's tendency to behave in a talkative and outgoing manner ? or conversely in a quiet and reserved manner.

In its traditional form, this view emphasizes dispositions that are cross-situationally broad ? meaning that they affect behavior across a wide range of situations. For example, according to

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John & Soto (Ch. 2 this volume), Extraversion is a personality trait reflecting the degree to which one enacts "an energetic approach to the social and material world," and Conscientiousness reflects the degree to which one exhibits "socially proscribed impulse control that facilitates task- and goal-directed behavior" (p. XXX). This covers a lot of ground. Considering the number of situations that are part of the social and/or material world and considering that many situations involve (or could involve) task-directed and goal-directed behavior, traits such as Extraversion and Conscientiousness are seen as affecting behavior across an extremely broad range of situations.

Dispositionally-oriented research often focuses on the way individuals act differently from each other, on average, and experience different life outcomes. When focused on dispositional sources of behavior, a research project would ideally begin by measuring a person's behavior in each of several situations and taking the average. For example, a researcher might observe an individual in several situations, measure her talkativeness in each, and compute her average talkativeness. Although how much she talks will surely vary from situation to situation, dispositionally-oriented research focuses on average tendencies, or one's typical or general level of talkativeness across situations.

When such averages are obtained for a sample of people across one set of situations, they can be correlated with, among other things, the same persons' behavior averaged across a different set of situations, or with their scores on a measure of a relevant personality disposition. The first correlation is an index of behavioral consistency, reflecting the degree to which the behavioral differences among people are consistent across sets of situations. The second reflects the association between the behavior and a specifically identified aspect of personality ? the degree to which the behavioral differences among people are related to differences in a given

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aspect of their personalities. Either way, the results reflect a dispositional influence on behavior. This is a standard method of research in personality psychology.

Dispositionally-focused work has generated a venerable research tradition. The foundation of this tradition is an effort to identify the important personality dispositions-- prototypically seen as personality traits--that are associated with the average behaviors of individuals, calculated across situations. Many candidates for "important" dispositions are available, ranging from the100 items of the California Q-set (e.g., Block, 2008) to the 61 items of the Inventory of the Individual Differences in the Lexicon (Wood, Nye, & Saucier, 2010), to the 11 "primary trait" scales of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (Tellegen & Waller, 2008), to the widely used Big Five (e.g., John & Soto, Ch. 2). Some of these candidates are highly specific; others are very general and the range of available content is vast. Allport and Odbert (1936) identified 17,953 trait terms in the dictionary, and there may be almost that many instruments available in the literature for measuring personality dispositions.

After identifying relevant dispositions, researchers may go in at least two directions. One direction looks backward in time to seek origins of the dispositions. Personality psychologists have long been interested in both the environmental roots (e.g., childhood experiences) and biological roots of personality. A particularly intriguing line of research is outlining the origins of personality dispositions in patterns of early experience as they interact with genetic predispositions (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2013; Caspi, Hariri, Holmes, Uher, & Moffitt, 2010). A second direction looks forward in time to identify (and perhaps predict) life outcomes that eventually become associated with personality dispositions. Researchers have found that a number of important outcomes can be predicted from measures of personality gathered years

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earlier, including criminal behavior, mental health, occupational success, relationship satisfaction, and physical well-being (e.g., Ozer & Benet-Mart?nez, 2006).

Dispositionally-oriented research has revealed many important facts, with two of particular relevance here. First, many personality dispositions can be distilled to a small set of fundamental traits. The Big Five framework identifies Extraversion, Neuroticism (or its converse, Emotional Stability), Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience (John & Soto, Ch. 2). The HEXACO framework is similar, but adds Honesty/Humility as a sixth factor (Ashton & Lee, 2007). Any comprehensive theory of personality must account for such dispositional organization. A second fact is that broad personality characteristics, such as personality traits, matter. They predict behavioral trends and have consequential outcomes, again ranging from criminal behavior to success in occupations and relationships to--literally--the length of one's life (Ozer & Benet-Mart?nez, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). For many outcomes, broad personality dispositions matter as much as, or more, than almost anything else, including socioeconomic status, money, or relationship quality. Any comprehensive theory of personality must find room for such dispositions.

The Situational Roots The situational root of interactionism is the recognition that a person's behavior is

affected by attributes of the situation in which the behavior occurs. People are particularly likely to enact a given behavior in particular situations, and there's something about those particular situations that triggers or elicits that behavior. For example, a situation that includes one's friends likely elicits talkativeness and affection. A situation that includes loud music and adult beverages may elicit dancing.

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